Meditative absorption

[strwbrycough]

@Leo Gura and anyone else who would like to chime in,  has anyone had full meditative absorption’s for a sustained period of time while not on psychedelics? If so, to what extent and how long/ type of practice did you do to get there?  ( meditative absorption in this context meaning, everything from stream entry to full on 5-Meo all time, experience and content, body, ceases into white infinity). 

[Consilience]

5 days straight during an online retreat with Shinzen Young alternating between his See Hear Feel vipassana technique/shikantaza/self inquiry. My concentration was so sharp I was watching the moment by moment flux of the phenomenological field expand and contract out of and back into literal nothingness. There was a palpability to the context out of which reality was arising and dying into moment by moment such that this context, this emptiness, was experienced to be more real than perception, even though it was no-thing, an actual void. Even when the self was manifesting, I saw with crystal clarity the perceptual aggregates that are typically knotted up and coagulated into the feeling of "me," but in this state, even this feeling of me was seen to be completely unreal, moment after moment after moment. Perception was experienced as almost being liquid, fluid, spacious, wave like, effervescent, contractive and expansive. And when perception is experienced with this degree of mindfulness, one's ego suddenly has no solidity whatsoever. It's like form became quicksand and all that was left was formlessness. 

It was magnitudes beyond anything I've experienced while on a psychedelic. The problem with psychedelics is that they're so energetically overloading this can have a scattering effect of the mind; the psychedelic is dragging the mind into the present moment, sometimes violently. Whereas with this degree of meditative absorption, there's a lightness, a clarity, a precision, a purity that I've yet to experience on psyches. However, it also felt like I integrated every psychedelic trip I'd had on that retreat.

Now whenever I meditate, regardless of what technique, I pretty much enter into some sort of absorption state. These states in and of themselves are not "it." It's easy to see the illusion of self and world when in such an absorption state. Can we see the illusion of self and world while we're getting chewed out by our boss, while we're experiencing physical pain, while we're trying to hit on a girl, while we're driving, while we're meditating for absurdly long periods of time, etc.? There are many litmus tests to our degree of understanding besides the frequency or intensity of absorption during a comfortable practice period, I've come to realize. However, having a powerful, sustain, sober satori seems to be an important first step towards an authentic experiential embodiment of truth. 

Lately I seem to be hitting into the "white infinity" part without psychedelics and the fear of death has started spontaneously popping up during sober practice. I just assume death coming up as a theme during meditation means I'm doing something right. 

[WelcometoReality]

@strwbrycough yes, stream-entry and up, duration about 4 years. A range of mindfulness practices, lately it's been "noting gones" that has seemed effective.

[The0Self]

Started out with the mind illuminated and then eventually got there. The first time I entered first jhana I was blown away by just how unbelievably powerful it was. At the time it blew any psychedelic experience I’d ever had out of the water by a factor of like 10.